Episode 53: Christian Angermayer - Founder of Apeiron Investment Group

**Amir Fischer** (0:00)
This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Christian Angermayer, German serial entrepreneur, founder of Apeiron Investment Group, and one of the most influential founders and investors of his generation.
At 20 years old, just weeks after enrolling in university, Christian dropped out to co-found Ribopharma. The company merged with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in 2003, and eventually went public via SPAC, making them a multimillionaire at 25 He channeled that into Apeiron, a private investment firm with over $7 billion under management, and went on to found three unicorns and back four more. In 2018, he founded a tie life sciences to bring psychedelic compounds into mainstream psychiatry, taking it public on Nasdaq at a $3.2 billion valuation in 2021
Just this past Friday, his latest venture made its public market debut, Enhanced Games, a performance enhancing drug permitted alternative to the Olympics that doubles as a performance medicine and telehealth business, listed on the New York Stock Exchange at an over billion dollar market cap. In our conversation, we talked about building an IPO in his first company, 25, the psychedelic renaissance in a tie, what Enhanced Games is actually building, and much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the podcast and rate it 5 stars on Spotify, subscribe on YouTube, and share to anyone who you think might find it valuable. I really enjoyed this conversation with Christian, and I hope you guys enjoy listening. Thank you. Thank you, Christian, for coming on. I really appreciate it.

**Christian Angermayer** (1:17)
Thanks for having me.

**Amir Fischer** (1:19)
Well, first of all, I want to say congrats for the IPO of Enhanced Games yesterday, and then also, before we talk about that, I want to get started, where I always do, the beginning. Tell me about growing up in Bavaria. What was your life like there? What kind of kid were you?
Tell me about all that.

**Christian Angermayer** (1:34)
It's like, so long ago. Where do we start? Yes, it was in Bavaria. It was in a very rural area. I grew up in a 100, 150 people village.
Then when I was nine, I moved to the next bigger town, which was 2,500 people. So all very, very rural, very like, meaning I was, what is in America, the show like out of the 50s, where children live in the countryside. Like one of these TV things, like I was playing outside in winter, in summer.
There was no crime, there was no drugs, like very, very sheltered and very, I think, basic in a good meaning. I loved it. I think still my, I think it took, I actually, I really think back a lot of my childhood and I loved it and I also loved high school and everything because it was so, such a, how do you say, such a, yeah, sort of small cosmos. You knew exactly what's right, exactly what's wrong, you know, when you do this. This is actually what I'm missing the most. I think, I mean, that's, I think, in general, the beauty of going to high school or whatever is, or in the time till you're like 18, you kind of have a framework and you more or less, maybe you are the exception because you're already investing whatever, but like, so it's great when you're doing, but also I tell you, you're going to look back and say, ah, like the normal stuff was great because like, what I'm missing a bit is like, if you're doing the job I'm doing and you started to do, is like, it's never enough kind of, not a bad way, but like if you are ambitious, like I can always do one more interview, I can always do one more investment.

**Amir Fischer** (3:14)
There's no end state.

**Christian Angermayer** (3:16)
There's no end state. And in high school, you kind of knew, you know what, in Germany, it's in July, the year ends. If I, I was very good. So if I have an A plus everywhere, that's the end state. There is no more. And then I'm going to go for six weeks on summer holiday and like I'm completely off and whatever. And I've even seen, like I had, I never had that. I think the only thing which comes close to that is when people switch jobs, because sometimes they're like, okay, I tell everybody who's applying or coming to us, I was like, hey, as much as I want you right now, maybe go for a month or two to travel the world or whatever, because like it's so rare. I never had that. That's the one, and it's like white girls' problems, because my life was amazing. But like the one thing, like I went out of high school and literally started my first company like a year later.